Hi Jan, and welcome! I was new to this forum in 2011. This is a great place to learn about hostas and the people are wonderful! Sometimes I feel like the whole forum is out there with me when I'm wandering through my gardens. Here's my story: In 2006, I bought 6 hostas in the fall for 75 cents each, planted them at the back of the fence and forgot about them. In 2008, I divided an Undulata Albomarginata into 10 hostas to form a border around my pachysandra bed. In the spring of 2010, I noticed that the 75 cent hostas had grown into lovely plants despite the fact that they had been ignored for the past four years. I also noticed that all the other perennials I had planted over the past four years had died! So, I made a trip to the local nursery to get some more hostas to fill in the spots where my perennials had died. It was on that day that I made the startling discovery that those names on the tags like Elegans and Frances Williams meant something. I ended the season with about 70 new varieties. During the fall of 2010, I found this forum and for the next 6 months, I read each and every post. I started making lists and finding nurseries to buy the hostas on my list. On March 28, 2011, my husband drove 60 miles (one way) to pick up some of the hostas on my list. He came back with 11. When the first nursery in our area opened on April 1, 2011, I bought 9 more. On April 2, I drove the 60 miles with my husband and got another 23. Well, before I knew it, I ended up with 96 hostas in our house waiting for the last frost! By the end of May, I had aquired about 180 hostas and swore that I was done buying for the season. I managed to buy 134 more, for a total of 314 new ones in 2011. My kids call me the crazy hosta lady. My son still talks about driving with 40 hostas in the back of the car, accompanied by a chirping cricket for 300 miles! My daughter, a Creative Writing major in college, wrote her final paper about my hosta obsession. She got an "A", her professor was intrigued that people actually collect hostas and will go to great lengths to find a certain cultivar. I don't know how large our gardens are, but the grass in the back is slowly disappearing. We have plans to start planting them in the park in back of us when we run out of room. I love to grow my hostas in full sun, I won an irrigation system in a contest that keeps them cool with misting water during the hottest part of the day. Gesila

The scratch is a brass-color and the entire lamp is magnetic, except for the finial. Thanks for reminding me of the magnet trick! I used to carry one in my wallet for testing "brass" until it wiped out a couple of credit cards. My husband says he thinks it is steel, with brass-plating on the base. (Though why someone would brass-plate the base and not the rest, I don't know.) I've never seen steel used like this in a lamp, but then again, I haven't seen everything ... or maybe I have, now. The man has no soul. He suggested taking it to an auto body shop and having it powdercoated in candy-apple red. I hope his tongue was in his cheek. I think I'll follow LInda's suggestion and spray it with lacquer once it's cleaned up, then take it to the electrician. This is not the kind of thing I would rewire myself. I've ordered a wire candelabra-lamp frame to cover -- just have to pick out fabrics for it. Lazyg, I'll see if I can get a shot of the whole fireplace. It' ll have to wait until tomorrow, when there's more light. The surround and hearth are English handmade tiles with glass tile accents -- not too expensive, since it's a small space, and the tile has a lot of impact. We remodeled this room recently. What? No one noticed the beautiful cat? I couldn't keep him away from the camera.

Nice looking little seedling! And unusual that it is showing many of the same traits as the mama tree. Not always (in fact, rarely) the case with open pollinated seeds. Is the last a current photo of the mama tree? My MY is screaming yellow at the moment and in the process of dropping all its leaves. And to my knowledge, has never produced any samaras.

Well, it's been a difficult couple of weeks. First of all, I've been so busy with other obigations, that I've not spent as much time as I would like learning the new machine. Then... where to start. Since I bought the machine on consignment, the owners of the shop, although they came and installed the machine for me, were not knowledgeable about my brand of frame. So what I learned by watching YouTube videos, but mostly by talking to a wonderful representative of the Grace Company who downloaded operating manuals and parts lists to my tablet, was that one of the bars was installed backwards and that the take-up bar on the frame actually moved forward and back while the machine quilted. Getting this all working entailed quite a bit of crawling around under the frame, but I finally got it. The tension was set poorly and was leaving eyelashes on the back of the quilt, but when I tightened the top tension, the fabric puckered. So I loosened the bobbin tension, lowered the upper tension and finally got that balanced. Learning the computer program wa another challenge. I spent a fair amount of time, yelling at the videos or tearing my hair out trying to read the manuals, but I actually made a lot of progress today. What didn't work was the spacing when I set the second zone. That's for another day. Oh, I missed telling you how long it took me to learn to load the quilt layers properly. I had bought Red Snappers and clips for floating the quilt, but I decided that for me as a beginner, pinning was the way to go. The stitching running horizontally looks great when running with the computer, but the vertical stitches are not always in line. I'll have to work on that fix too. I'll call Kimberly at Grace again, but I like to give her a few days in between my calls to recover. I'm sure that eventually I'll get this all down pat, but right now the learning curve is really steep. And I haven't even begun to learn how to "repair" the pattern when the bobbin runs out or the thread breaks. Oh, well. They say learning new skills is really good for the aging mind. If this is true, my mind should have gotten about 10 years younger after all this. Thanks for asking, Donna. I wish one of you experienced longarmers lived close by. All suggestions are welcome.